It’s all your fault. Really. I could have lived a long time … Now, I just can’t get it out of my head. Every time I turn around…!

“I’m not asking anybody,” said Eeyore. “I’m just telling everybody. We can look for the North Pole, or we can play ‘Here we go gathering Nuts in May’ with the end part of an ants’ nest. It’s all the same to me.”

Eeyore, the old grey Donkey, stood by the side of the stream, and looked at himself in the water.

“Pathetic,” he said. “That’s what it is. Pathetic.”

He turned and walked slowly down the stream for twenty yards, splashed across it, and walked slowly back on the other side. Then he looked at himself in the water again.

“As I thought,” he said. “No better from this side.”

It’s been a while since anyone with any sense has addressed the problem of what a genuine politics in our modern mass societies would look like, not since One-dimensional Man, and The Port Huron Statement, anyway. Since I’ve spent over forty years thinking about this, ever since a bunch of idiots burned the Bank of America branch in my home town, and the Maoists took over SDS from us philosophes, I figure I’ll have a bash.

Even if I’m not as clever as Gramsci, or as experienced as Saul Alinsky, someone has to try it. We can’t let Adnoto, buckheru, and Chris Sinnard be the only ones to square off against the American Moloch, can we?

As I understand it, Gramsci didn’t think his “war of maneuver” would be successful in the west.

That ain’t exactly an easy task, and it’s not something you can accomplish overnight, either. Worse yet, you can’t really trust anybody who doesn’t understand the nature of the process to be much of an ally. If you’re as dedicated — and as dogged — as Jane, you tend to come to a point where you’re tempted to break out the pitchforks and torches. Win or lose, that’s the most dangerous point you’re ever likely to come to in the course of the struggle — ask any revolutionary of the past.

Be patient, be determined, and be careful what you wish for in your darker moments — that’d be my advice, and not mine alone.

But that’s only part of the story of why the progressive movement languishes, and I agree with Milbank that it does. I love the sausage-making process much more than the bomb-throwing, and I find taking part in incremental victories on issues like social security, cramdown or oversight of the Fed more satisfying than thundering defeats. But I have come to understand that the institutional forces that prevent real change from happening are more formidable and more structural than I anticipated.

That isn’t Obama’s fault, either.